drive thru deck

I find it so funny how the kids pick up all the small details in our lives, then process them through their gigantic minds and, eventually, incorporate them into some sort of game.

Every night while i make dinner the kids play on the balcony off the kitchen and i throw open the french doors so our house seems that much larger for half of the year. Invariably they each grab one of their favourite wheeled toys that are out there; parker usually uses one of the cozy coupe trucks, eliza rides the tricycle and toby perches on top of his little battery operated motorcycle that he got for his third birthday but refuses to admit he's grown out of. Sometimes they're all on the scooters or their bicycles, but more often than not they choose the miniature "real" things.

Tonight they created an elaborate "drive-thru" game using all the recycling that i had piled up on the deck waiting to be run out to the boxes. Parker pulled up to the drive-thru window and ordered "a large coffee with two creams and ten timbits."

Every day, at some point, i find reason to go to the Tim Hortons drive-thru and get a large coffee with two creams. Sometimes the kids have a milk, or a chocolate milk, or a bagel with cream cheese and very rarely a box of timbit donuts.

Across the way from the Tim Hortons is a McDonalds. I try really, really hard not to feed my kids that crappy food, but every now and then i cave and get them some sort of happy meal or perhaps an order of hash browns.

Every time we go by parker asks for something, usually a hash brown. I often tell him it's not hash brown time or when he wants chocolate milk and i want him to have regular i say "they don't have any today..." or some other small lie for the sake of his health.

When it was parkers turn to be the drive thru window attendant he answered every order with "it's not bagel time - it's hash brown time!"